Since the dawn of time, humans have used the sky to travel across the desert or the ocean.
Thanks to the stars, they forged founding stories, myths, religions.
And always searched the sky for answers impossible to find elsewhere.
Chance or divine will, infinitely large or infinitely small, the sky is a reflective space that pushes everyone to their intimate entrenchments.
"We are born in a skin, in a body that has no answer: if one thing unites all cultures, from all eras, it is the pleasure and the need to tell a story about our existence", sums up Christophe Galfard.
If we find traces of astrology from the middle of the 3rd millennium BC (in Mesopotamia) and if the big bang appears metaphorically in many founding texts, scientific discoveries have extended our gaze towards the sky .
“By dint of scrutinizing the stars, people realized that things were repeated, that certain movements could be predicted.
Aristotle (
who had understood that the Earth was round, Editor's note
), then Newton, with universal gravitation, brought a real, scientific basis to these immemorial stories.
Also, when a black hole is photographed, the Higgs boson is discovered or men walk on the surface of the Moon, the human community is dizzy in front of the impalpable captured.
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The past and the future
A year ago, the interpreter of Captain Kirk in
Star Trek
, William Shatner, made a trip to space, the real one.
However, contrary to his childhood dream, the experience plunged him into infinite sadness.
He was taken, like others before him, by a badly named
overview effect
: the blue planet (and him with it) seemed to him tiny, ridiculous.
It is said that looking at the sky is looking at the past: some stars that we see are only the light of stars that have disappeared.
Likewise, certain brighter points, the white dwarfs, tell us about the future of our solar system, which will eventually be devoured by its star.
“There are so many ideas and
There are so many ideas and strong emotions brewed when you project yourself into the stars… You feel vulnerable
Christophe Galfard, astrophysicist
So, many choose the comfort of the community: shooting star observation workshops are a hit everywhere in France, each solar eclipse is like a break in a rushed daily life.
We may not all be born under a lucky star, but we look the same.
The researcher's conferences are packed with sometimes scientific, sometimes metaphysical questions: black holes, time, parallel universes, reality.
A gift from heaven
At the end of the movie
Men in Black
, two extraterrestrials play with marbles in which are contained galaxies, universes, solar systems, including ours.
A bewitching image, whispering how the infinitely small and the infinitely large are one and the same thing.
Seeing the rings of Saturn with one's own eyes through a small telescope or proving the existence of a star through mathematics and physics, this provokes - for the average person and the scientist - a particular inner joy: that of touching grace, to connect to something much higher.
"Unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos is a human heritage: there is nothing to pay, it cannot be taken back from us, there is no copyright on scientific discoveries, it is a real gift, accessible to everybody.
Conferences in partnership with MK2 cinemas.
“Does time exist?” on January 21 at MK2 Bibliothèque and on January 22 at MK2 Odéon (Saint-Germain side), at 11 a.m.
mk2.com.
Christophe Galfard is the author of
The Universe at Hand
, Ed.
Flammarion (2017).
